The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Haruki Murakami · Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru · a novel in three books · Shinchosha, 1994 and 1995 · scored on Murakami’s Japanese, read from knowledge, with Jay Rubin’s abridged English (1997) for sense; no text in hand, and no translation quoted
Mode
A quest in a suburb joined to a novel of war; surreal domestic realism, testimony, detective story and descent narrative in one narration
Mythos
The descent into the underworld to win back a wife taken by a dark power, in the form of Orpheus and of Izanagi going down to Yomi for Izanami; two wells made one hole; a mark that heals; a bird no one sees that winds the world
Phase
From a telephone call in a kitchen in 1984, through the lost cat, the lost wife and the well, to Room 208, Noboru Wataya’s fall and Kumiko’s letter; and, in the testimonies, from the Khalkha River in 1938 to Hsinking in August 1945
Presentation
Fiction; three books, the third published a year after the first two; first person, past tense, told by Okada Toru, with long embedded narratives: a spoken testimony and a letter, stories, numbered computer files, letters, newspaper reports and an exchange by computer terminal
Register
From Toru’s plain, cool narration and May Kasahara’s exact talk to the formal, measured speech of an old officer, the oracular voices of the Kano sisters and the flat horror of the testimony
Scale
One marriage in one alley of Tokyo, and through it a family of power, the state, and Japan’s war on the continent from 1938 to 1945
Governing Proposition
A man without work in a quiet district of Tokyo loses his cat and then his wife; while he waits, strangers come to him with their stories, among them an old officer who tells of a mission across the Khalkha River in 1938, a man skinned alive and a dry well in the Mongolian steppe, and the man climbs down into a dry well of his own, in the garden of an empty house down the alley, and passes through its wall into a hotel room where the power that took his wife can be fought. The wager of the novel is that the violence of Japan’s war on the continent did not end with defeat but went underground into the order that followed, and that a passive man in a suburb, by going down into himself, can reach it there and win back what it took from him.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel opens in a kitchen. Okada Toru is cooking spaghetti, and the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie is on the radio, when the telephone rings and a woman he does not know asks him for ten minutes. The first book bears the opera’s name, Dorobō kasasagi hen. In one page the book has set its law: the domestic, interrupted by an unknown voice.
Toru has left his job at a law firm and has no work. The cat has gone missing. It is named after Kumiko’s brother, Noboru Wataya, and its loss begins the loss of Kumiko. The alley behind the house leads to an empty house with a dry well in its garden, and a girl of sixteen, May Kasahara, enters the book. In the trees near the house a bird no one sees cries with a sound like the winding of a spring. Toru and Kumiko call it the wind-up bird, and Toru will later imagine it winding the world each day.
The book is told by Toru, in the first person and the past tense, and he does very little. Around him gather other people’s voices: Malta Kano and her sister Creta, who come to him with stories; the woman on the telephone; later an old officer, a girl’s letters, the files of a computer. Each figure arrives, delivers a story and departs. The novel is a set of testimonies around an empty centre, a man who does not act, does not know his wife and does not know his country’s history, and who must learn all three from others before he can go down and act.
Movement II
An old soldier Toru has never met, Lieutenant Mamiya, tells him his story. In 1938 Mamiya was sent with a small party on a mission across the Khalkha River at the Mongolian border. Before Mamiya’s eyes a man of the party, Yamamoto, was skinned alive. Then Mamiya was thrown into a deep dry well in the steppe.
At the bottom of the well, once a day, for some seconds, the sun stood directly overhead and filled the shaft with light, a light so intense that he felt he could die of it. In that light he felt that he had been given grace and then denied it. He came out of the well alive, and he says that his life ended there, and that he has lived since as an empty shell. The account is the book’s height, and it is told without raising its voice.
The testimony is spoken in the formal, measured speech of an old officer, and it is the book’s finest making: the flat voice makes the skinning unbearable because it does not raise itself to meet it. The account goes on in a letter. Through the testimonies the Kwantung Army, Nomonhan in 1939, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945 and the Soviet camps enter a novel that began with spaghetti and a lost cat. A man who does not know his own history is told it by a stranger, and the well in the steppe is set beside the well down the alley.
Movement III
Kumiko goes, and does not come back. The one who seems to stand behind her going is her brother, Noboru Wataya: smooth and televised, heir to a family of bureaucrats and politicians, and on his way to the Diet. The book never shows how his power works. Toru feels it as an atmosphere, and so does the reader, and the evil of the book’s antagonist remains a presence, not a mechanism. Kumiko’s family carries an older wound as well, in her sister’s suicide.
Toru climbs down into the dry well in the garden of the empty house and sits in the dark. May Kasahara draws up the rope ladder. He waits, and cannot get out, and the stillness is long: the book’s long stillnesses are this waiting, and the form becomes literal in the shaft. In the dark he passes through the wall of the well into the corridor of a hotel. The well in Tokyo in 1984 now answers the well in Mongolia in 1938: the old soldier was thrown into his, and the young man goes down into his own.
He comes out of the well marked, with a dark stain on his cheek. The second book, Yogen suru tori hen, Bird as Prophet, closes on what seems a complete ending. The first two books were published together in 1994, and for a year the novel stood as finished: a man who had lost his wife had gone down into the dark and come back changed.
Movement IV
The third book, Torisashi otoko hen, The Birdcatcher, came a year later, in 1995, and it adds a new apparatus to a novel that had closed. Nutmeg Akasaka and Cinnamon run a business of healing, and women pay Nutmeg to touch the mark on Toru’s cheek. Ushikawa appears. The middle of the book runs at ground level, and the threads opened in the first books, Malta Kano and Creta Kano’s invitation to Crete, are left where they were.
Nutmeg tells of her father, a veterinarian at the zoo in Hsinking, the capital of Manchukuo. In August 1945, as the Soviet army comes, Japanese soldiers are ordered to kill the zoo animals, and he watches them do it. The scene is dread and absurdity together. Chinese cadets are killed in Hsinking too, and a baseball bat is used in that killing. The book’s third history has been told: after the steppe in 1938 and the suburb in 1984, the city of the zoo in the last days of the empire.
The files of Cinnamon’s computer are titled “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” and numbered, and the novel’s title enters the novel as their name. Kumiko speaks to Toru through a computer terminal, so that the end of the marriage arrives on a screen. May Kasahara writes to him from a wig factory in the mountains, and calls him by the name of the bird. Each form is chosen to its matter, and the book that began as one man’s narration is by now an archive of other people’s voices, with the narrator at its centre still waiting to act.
Movement V
A baseball bat passes to Toru from a man with a guitar case, and it is the same weapon in every world: at a Hsinking execution, and now in his hands. Through the wall of the well he reaches Room 208 of the hotel, where a woman speaks to him in the dark. A figure comes into the room, and Toru fights it with the bat. What he kills there, the book does not say.
In the waking world, Noboru Wataya falls ill. The descent has worked: the power that took the wife has been struck where it lives, in a room that exists in a dream, and the blow lands in Tokyo. What was done on the continent is done again in that room, and the two wells, one in the steppe and one down the alley, have become a single hole through which violence passes between times. The law is never stated, and the reader must infer it, not always with success.
Kumiko writes to Toru that she will end her brother’s life, and she does, and she will stand trial. Toru waits for her. Whether her act is a liberation or a second defilement the book leaves open, as it leaves open what Noboru Wataya was, and what the bird winds. The novel that began with an unknown voice on the telephone closes on a letter and a man who waits, and the history it brought up from the bottom of a well is not resolved by the marriage, only joined to it.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds much that could go, and the axis is the lowest of the twelve. The spine is required: the cat’s disappearance and then Kumiko’s, the well, Mamiya’s testimony, the bat, Room 208. Around it stand figures whose threads are opened and left. Malta Kano drops away; Creta Kano’s story ends with an invitation to Crete, declined and forgotten; and Book Three adds a new apparatus, Nutmeg and Cinnamon’s business of healing, the exchange by computer terminal, Ushikawa, to reach an ending the first two books had nearly reached. Some of this is the book’s dream logic, in which a figure arrives, delivers a story and departs. What holds the axis at 7.5, the threshold the summit asks, is that the close of Book Two showed the work could stand without Book Three’s machinery.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds, in two registers. In the public one: the violence of Japan’s war on the continent, Nomonhan, a man skinned alive at the Mongolian border, the zoo animals and the Chinese cadets killed in Hsinking in 1945, was not ended by defeat but went underground into the order that followed, and it lives on in the smooth, televised power of Noboru Wataya, heir to a family of bureaucrats and politicians. In the private one: a man can live for years beside his wife and not know her, and to win her back he must go down into himself. The book joins the two: the violence in the marriage and the violence in the history are one. Held below the gate because the join is made by dream and image rather than articulated, and Noboru’s evil is felt as an atmosphere more than shown as a mechanism.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation is frequent, and at its height strong. Lieutenant Mamiya at the bottom of the Mongolian well, where for a few seconds a day the sun stands directly overhead and floods the shaft with a light so intense that he feels he could die of it, and who afterwards lives as an empty shell. The skinning of Yamamoto, told by the man who watched, in a flat voice that makes it unbearable. The zoo animals shot in Hsinking in August 1945, dread and absurdity together. Toru in the dark of his own well, passing through its wall into the corridor of a hotel. The uncanny is the book’s ordinary weather, and the suburb itself becomes a place of terror. Held below the higher reaches because the long middle of Book Three, the business of healing and the computer exchange, runs at ground level.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Myth built, and the plot rests on it. The hero descends into a well, an underworld, to win back a wife taken from him by a dark power: the oldest of descent narratives, in the form of Orpheus and of Izanagi going down to Yomi for Izanami, and here the descent works. He comes back marked, with a dark stain on his cheek, and the mark heals others. The two holes, a well in Tokyo in 1984 and a well in Mongolia in 1938, make the private descent and the national one a single figure. The unseen wind-up bird that winds the world’s spring each day is a myth of the book’s own making. The particular stays particular: an alley, a vacant house, a sixteen-year-old in a wig factory. Held at the bar of the gate, not above it, because some figures, the faceless man and the woman on the telephone, are evoked more than built, their meaning withheld rather than borne.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is double. In Japanese fiction: the war writing of Ōoka Shōhei and Ibuse Masuji, and the work of Ōe Kenzaburō, against which Murakami had defined himself. In American fiction: Chandler, Vonnegut, Brautigan, Fitzgerald and Carver, several of whom he translated. And his own manner, the cool, detached first person of A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, in which the swerve from the Japanese tradition had already been made. The turn here is from detachment to commitment: the manner of pop surrealism made to carry the atrocities of the Kwantung Army. The stake was real: a writer with an immense young readership gave it a skinning and a war. Held below the gate because the instrument was the author’s existing one, and the turn is in its matter.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. A passive narrator who cannot act, around whom others’ testimonies gather, enacts the book’s claim: the self is reached only through other people’s stories, and a man who does not know his own history must be told it by an old soldier he does not know. The well is the form made literal: the narrator must stop, go down, sit in the dark and wait, and the book’s long stillnesses are that waiting. The embedded forms are chosen to their matter: the war arrives as spoken testimony and a letter, the occult as monologue, the end of the marriage on a computer screen. Held off the top because Book Three was added to a form that had closed, and its new apparatus accretes; and because the frame could hold a different set of testimonies without the work knowing much less.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, and the evidence is three decades of return in two languages. The book is commonly called the summit of Murakami’s work, and readers come back to it as to no other of his novels. The questions it plants stay open: what Noboru Wataya is, and what the narrator killed in Room 208; whether Kumiko’s act at the end is a liberation or a second defilement; whether the history redeems the fantasy or the fantasy evades the history, the charge some Japanese critics brought against it. Each return finds the war and the marriage still joined and the join still unexplained. Held at 8.3 because some of what returns is mystification: questions the book declines to answer rather than deepens.
Score: 8.3 / 10
A published work, so force and reach are scored together. The field is Japanese fiction after the war and, since the book’s reach was global, the international novel of the 1990s. The force is real and bounded: the book brought the repressed history of Japan’s war on the continent into the popular literary novel and joined it to a private quest in a manner of surreal suburban realism, a reorganisation of what Murakami’s mode could hold; but the mode was his own already, and the history had been written by others. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: this is the book by which Murakami was received abroad as a serious novelist, after Norwegian Wood had made his fame in Japan; it has been translated widely; and the manner it brought to maturity has been taken up by novelists across the world. Reach is the larger part, and the force holds the axis a tenth below the gate.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Survival is shown over thirty-one years. The form survives whole in Japanese, as published in three books, and its presence has been continuous and wide, in Japan and abroad. The surface is mostly free of its moment: an alley, a well, a war fifty years past. Book Three’s exchange by computer terminal is dated, and grows more so. Abroad, most readers have met the book in an abridged English; that is a fact of its presence and a shortfall of the translation, and the work is not charged for it. What holds the axis is the span: three decades demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen. It stands at the bar of the gate, the figure its span carries.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on the Japanese, within plain limits: the original sentence, its plainness much praised and much attacked in Japan, is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. What carries across is the command of narrative. The opening, Toru cooking spaghetti in the kitchen with Rossini’s overture to The Thieving Magpie on the radio when a woman he does not know telephones, sets the book’s law in a page: the domestic interrupted by an unknown voice. Mamiya’s testimony is a different instrument, the formal, measured speech of an old officer, and its control is the book’s finest making. The embedded forms are handled well, the suspense of the well chapters is sustained, and May Kasahara’s talk is exact. The charges: Book Three’s pacing slackens, the computer exchange is clumsy as narrative, and some figures speak in one oracular register.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Yamamoto skinned alive at the Mongolian border in 1938, told as plain testimony, and a woman in Tokyo in 1984 who calls herself a prostitute of the mind and wears her hair in a style of the early 1960s. They obey one law, mostly: violence and desire pass between persons and between times through holes, wells, dreams and a telephone line, and what was done on the continent is done again in a hotel room that exists in a dream. The range is wide, from war realism to suburban comedy to the occult, and the law holds the war and the marriage together. Charged, and second from the foot of the twelve: the law is never stated and sometimes cannot be inferred; threads end without consequence, Malta Kano and Creta Kano’s Crete among them; and Book Three’s business of healing sits uneasily under the physics of the first two books.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Many orders, and the descent into the well joins them. History and the state: the Kwantung Army, Manchukuo, Nomonhan, the Soviet camps, and postwar politics in Noboru Wataya’s election to the Diet. The family: a marriage, Kumiko’s family and her sister’s suicide, Toru’s own want of family. Consciousness, in Toru’s stillness and May’s adolescence. Sexuality, in Creta Kano and the woman on the telephone. Labour and money: the law firm Toru has left, a wig factory, the commerce of healing. The media, in Noboru’s power on television. The sacred and the occult, in the Kano sisters, the mark and the well. The natural order, in the zoo animals and the cat. They are integrated, not listed. Thin: Japan’s present society beyond one alley and one politician, and any public life outside the family of power the book indicts.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep and The Imperishable at 8.5, then The Unconcealment, The Sublime, Pressure on Tradition and The Encompassed at 8.4. A descent built into the plot, two wells made one hole and the return marked on the hero’s body; three decades of continuous presence on a surface mostly free of its moment; a disclosure in two registers joined into one, the war gone underground and a marriage not known; heights at the bottom of the Mongolian well and in a flat voice telling a skinning; and many orders, the state, the family, the occult and the war, held by one descent.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.5 and The Inner Law at 8.0. The first is held because figures are opened and left, Malta Kano and Creta Kano’s Crete among them, and because Book Three adds a new apparatus to reach an ending the first two books had nearly reached; the second because its law is never stated, threads end without consequence, and Book Three’s business of healing sits uneasily under the first books’ physics. Next above them, The Swerve and The Living Form at 8.2: the instrument was already the author’s, and Book Three was added to a form that had closed.
The Necessity Cap is met at its limit: The Inevitable stands at 7.5, exactly the threshold. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.3, The Living Form at 8.2, The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: The Archetypal Deep and The Imperishable meet the bar of 8.5 exactly, but The Unconcealment and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 fall a tenth short and The Swerve at 8.2 three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met at its limit (the lowest axis it covers, The Inevitable, stands at 7.5, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.3, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru, by Murakami Haruki, born in Kyoto in 1949, published by Shinchosha in three books: Book One, Dorobō kasasagi hen (The Thieving Magpie), and Book Two, Yogen suru tori hen (Bird as Prophet), in 1994; Book Three, Torisashi otoko hen (The Birdcatcher), in 1995. It is scored as one novel in three books, in Murakami’s Japanese as first published, the third book included. The book is in copyright and no text of it, Japanese or English, was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis, The Made and the verbal part of The Inevitable included, is judged on the work in Japanese. No translation is quoted; Japanese is given only in the titles, romanised, with their English; everything else is paraphrased. Translation · Jay Rubin’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Knopf, 1997; Harvill, 1998), read for sense. It is the one English translation, and so the best available. It is abridged, and the extent of the cuts could not be verified. Neither the abridgement nor any other shortfall of the English is charged to the work; where the cuts may hide matter that bears on The Inevitable and The Inner Law, the page judges only what the design of the three books shows. The Japanese sentence, its rhythm, its register and the plainness much argued over in Japan, is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged; so is whatever the abridgement removed. Citations are by book, since the English numbering of the chapters is not the Japanese. Facts that could not be verified, among them the months of publication, the dates of the action as the English book-headings give them, the ward of Tokyo in which it is set, the length of the volumes, the prizes the book received, its place in the order of the author’s novels, the extent and circumstances of the abridgement, the number of languages into which it has been translated, the sources of the second and third books’ titles, and the record of its critics and of its influence on particular later writers, are not given.